Zongwei Wu

Bin Ren, Eduard Zamfir, Zongwei Wu et al.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, the need for an efficient model to restore any degraded image has become increasingly significant and impactful. Traditional approaches typically involve training dedicated models for each specific degradation, resulting in inefficiency and redundancy. More recent solutions either introduce additional modules to learn visual prompts significantly increasing model size or incorporate cross-modal transfer from large language models trained on vast datasets, adding complexity to the system architecture. In contrast, our approach, termed RAM, takes a unified path that leverages inherent similarities across various degradations to enable both efficient and comprehensive restoration through a joint embedding mechanism without scaling up the model or relying on large multimodal models. Specifically, we examine the sub-latent space of each input, identifying key components and reweighting them in a gated manner. This intrinsic degradation awareness is further combined with contextualized attention in an X-shaped framework, enhancing local-global interactions. Extensive benchmarking in an all-in-one restoration setting confirms RAM's SOTA performance, reducing model complexity by approximately 82% in trainable parameters and 85% in FLOPs. Our code and models will be publicly available.

Xiaoning Liu, Zongwei Wu, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final outcomes. The objective of the challenge is to identify effective networks capable of producing brighter, clearer, and visually compelling images under diverse and challenging conditions. A remarkable total of 762 participants registered for the competition, with 28 teams ultimately submitting valid entries. This paper thoroughly evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in LLIE, showcasing the significant progress.

Eduard Zamfir, Zongwei Wu, Nancy Mehta et al.

Recent advancements in all-in-one image restoration models have revolutionized the ability to address diverse degradations through a unified framework. However, parameters tied to specific tasks often remain inactive for other tasks, making mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures a natural extension. Despite this, MoEs often show inconsistent behavior, with some experts unexpectedly generalizing across tasks while others struggle within their intended scope. This hinders leveraging MoEs' computational benefits by bypassing irrelevant experts during inference. We attribute this undesired behavior to the uniform and rigid architecture of traditional MoEs. To address this, we introduce ``complexity experts" -- flexible expert blocks with varying computational complexity and receptive fields. A key challenge is assigning tasks to each expert, as degradation complexity is unknown in advance. Thus, we execute tasks with a simple bias toward lower complexity. To our surprise, this preference effectively drives task-specific allocation, assigning tasks to experts with the appropriate complexity. Extensive experiments validate our approach, demonstrating the ability to bypass irrelevant experts during inference while maintaining superior performance. The proposed MoCE-IR model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, affirming its efficiency and practical applicability. The source code and models are publicly available at \href{https://eduardzamfir.github.io/moceir/}{\texttt{eduardzamfir.github.io/MoCE-IR/}}

Eduard Zamfir, Zongwei Wu, Nancy Mehta et al.

Reconstructing missing details from degraded low-quality inputs poses a significant challenge. Recent progress in image restoration has demonstrated the efficacy of learning large models capable of addressing various degradations simultaneously. Nonetheless, these approaches introduce considerable computational overhead and complex learning paradigms, limiting their practical utility. In response, we propose \textit{DaAIR}, an efficient All-in-One image restorer employing a Degradation-aware Learner (DaLe) in the low-rank regime to collaboratively mine shared aspects and subtle nuances across diverse degradations, generating a degradation-aware embedding. By dynamically allocating model capacity to input degradations, we realize an efficient restorer integrating holistic and specific learning within a unified model. Furthermore, DaAIR introduces a cost-efficient parameter update mechanism that enhances degradation awareness while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive comparisons across five image degradations demonstrate that our DaAIR outperforms both state-of-the-art All-in-One models and degradation-specific counterparts, affirming our efficacy and practicality. The source will be publicly made available at https://eduardzamfir.github.io/daair/

Jingzhi Li, Zongwei Wu, Eduard Zamfir et al.

Accurate 3D objects relighting in diverse unseen environments is crucial for realistic virtual object placement. Due to the albedo-lighting ambiguity, existing methods often fall short in producing faithful relights. Without proper constraints, observed training views can be explained by numerous combinations of lighting and material attributes, lacking physical correspondence with the actual environment maps used for relighting. In this work, we present ReCap, treating cross-environment captures as multi-task target to provide the missing supervision that cuts through the entanglement. Specifically, ReCap jointly optimizes multiple lighting representations that share a common set of material attributes. This naturally harmonizes a coherent set of lighting representations around the mutual material attributes, exploiting commonalities and differences across varied object appearances. Such coherence enables physically sound lighting reconstruction and robust material estimation - both essential for accurate relighting. Together with a streamlined shading function and effective post-processing, ReCap outperforms all leading competitors on an expanded relighting benchmark.

Joel Alberto Santos, Zongwei Wu, Xavier Alameda-Pineda et al.

Understanding human instructions is essential for enabling smooth human-robot interaction. In this work, we focus on object grounding, i.e., localizing an object of interest in a visual scene (e.g., an image) based on verbal human instructions. Despite recent progress, a dominant research trend relies on using text as an intermediate representation. These approaches typically transcribe speech to text, extract relevant object keywords, and perform grounding using models pretrained on large text-vision datasets. However, we question both the efficiency and robustness of such transcription-based pipelines. Specifically, we ask: Can we achieve direct audio-visual alignment without relying on text? To explore this possibility, we simplify the task by focusing on grounding from single-word spoken instructions. We introduce a new audio-based grounding dataset that covers a wide variety of objects and diverse human accents. We then adapt and benchmark several models from the closely audio-visual field. Our results demonstrate that direct grounding from audio is not only feasible but, in some cases, even outperforms transcription-based methods, especially in terms of robustness to linguistic variability. Our findings encourage a renewed interest in direct audio grounding and pave the way for more robust and efficient multimodal understanding systems.